God in the pain

I've been reading Fat is a Spiritual Issue. I love the way Ind talks about using her compulsive eating to blanket herself from pain, and by blanketting herself from pain separates herself from God.

I love the way Ind describes the pain and yet the life and reality of knowing God, relating to her pain, and allowing her to touch us and speak from within us in our pain. This somehow feels in a similar vein to my own thinking on the Crucifixion and Self Harm.

Our Heavenly Mother was not distant from her creation. She was not aloof, observing events in a detached uninterested manner. She was shaking in every junkie that comes down, starving in every child that has no food, shivering in the homeless, weeping in the bereaved, singing at the party, laughing at the banana skin, and ecstatic in every baby concieved into life. She was present in every moment and in each person. She invited us to respond to her, to live with all that we are. She called us to shake, to starve, to shiver, to weep, to sing, to laugh, to be in ecstacy with her.

And so when I was a compulsive eater it was not just my pain that I was cutting off from, it was God-in-me too. In refusing to listen to my depest parts I was ignoring God. My compulsive obsession was the antithesis of prayer. It was saying 'Sshh sshh sshh' to the feelings inside rather than 'Ow ow ow' with the one who incites us to share them with her....

...I learned to chose the pain of prayer rather that the pain of an eating disorder. I learnt to choose the pain of feeling with God rather than the pain of cutting myself off from her- I tried to stay awake in Gethsemane rahter than fall asleep. I preferred truth to lies. I risked allowing God-in-me to be.